Found this gem while searching for Morris Dancing... it has sat unopened on my shelves for some 20 years, but it looked interesting. And boy, was it ever interesting.
At times he seems like an unrepentant socialist rabble-rouser, at other tijmes like a tenured don in a conservative English department with a Robert Browning fixation. He quotes the Cato Institute and the Brookings Institution in support of some of his numbers.
Seeing that this was published in the late 90's, I expected it to be dated. Uh, not so much. More like prescient, and his trends have obviously continued, He doesn't name Trump but he predicted him by his universal fighting fetish and his "I love the poorly educated!" schtick.
His proposed solutions were a bit thin. Interesting, but could use some more meat. The bottom line is that here is a man who is convinced that liberal arts, classics, rhetoric, dialectic, philosophy, etc., are the real products of civilization and ours are worth saving.
You many not agree with all he has to say, but in the end he'll make you think about big issues in a new way. And that's the very essence of the Enlightenment he so desperately wants to save. ( )

The book presents clear evidence for the decline and hollowing out of America which the years' events since its publication in 1999 further prove. He finds the collapse unavoidable and then suggests the only ethical and meaningful way to live at this time is to quietly renounce the values of the culture and live according to one's own. Perhaps these counter lives will provide a beacon to a later enlightenment or not. ( )

some parts very good...some of the Freudian stuff, I don't know...dated??? ( )

i pretty much agree with everything he says. our culture, our politics, are cesspools of submediocrity. but all this talk about the meaningless of consumerism made me want to go out and buy some new threads. which i did. ( )

The key premise of this book is that America is going the way of most previous civilisations, having reached a pinnacle, there is an inevitable fall. He suggests that there is no avoidance of this pathway, and although each previous civilisation has met their fall in individual ways, there have been some commonalities. He looks at what he believes are shared problems with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Berman, however, also believes that although there is no way in which to do more than slow up the process, there are quiet actions that can be taken in order to provide the material post-fall, for the cultural phoenix to rise in the future, what he calls his ‘monastic option’.

The four areas he sees as the most damaging, and often interlocking, are:

- The increasing divide between the wealthy and less wealthy, which is currently reaching ever increasing heights. Also the dissipation of the middle classes.

- The inability or lack of desire to sustain the common entitlements including, for example, healthcare, social support etc.

- That education is becoming increasingly utilitarian – solely as a means to an end, rather than as a means of cultural expansion and enlightenment in itself

- ‘Spiritual death’ – or the increasing narrowness of possibilities for cultural growth and expansion caused by ‘McWorld’.

Although Berman discusses all the above, offering perspectives from both sides of the political spectrum, the focus is on the third (and the fourth in regards to how it impacts on the third).

He cites examples of major educational institutions being led/ruled by the administration and students rather than the academic body. Where academic heights are not encouraged unless they fulfil the desires of the student or corporate body they may be being sponsored by. Of instances where educational institutions refuse to fail weak students, and students being able to prosecute/persecute academics for not giving them the marks they desire, irrespective of their academic ability (I have heard of a personal incidence of the latter happening in Australia too).

He suggests much of this is caused by the ‘corporate’ educational system, where profit is put before the cart-horse, and failures would endanger the required numbers of students to enhance the treasure-trove. He also mentions in passing some of the projects that have shown substantial benefits from effective early learning that increase an individual’s learning capacities in later life, that are not being taken up as a national need, despite the benefits.

Berman is talking of a world where education is being weighed but not valued in its broadest sense.

He is also talking of a world in which many are choosing not to see the problems. A world which believes itself to be advancing, and that refuses to see the shadow side of the advances it is making.

Along with other historians, Berman cites the fictional works of writers such as Walter Miller, and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ as examples of foresight into the future we have ahead of us, where knowledge is perceived as worthless or dangerous if it refuses simply to support the mass consensus.

Berman suggests that the best we might be able to do is to leave traces, whispers of the depth and breadth of cultural possibilities to be found once we have reached the bottom of the pit of ‘fall’. He calls this ‘The Monastic Option’ after the fact that the cultural heritage we have was preserved, in some ways inadvertently he posits, by the monastic orders of the dark ages, who often didn’t understand or know what they were doing, but were doing it as a part of their monastic life.

He suggests that quiet, local, individual actions of cultural growth have the possibility of leaving behind traces that might be picked up in the future. These may simply be personal development, or they may impact on the local community. He cites a number of small initiatives that have transformed the lives of those who have participated, however warns that any such projects should remain out of the main stream or counter-culture as they will be drained of their power once the ‘mass’ culture takes them on board and absorbs them in McWorld.

Although he is optimistic that a phoenix will rise, he reminds the reader that nothing may succeed.

As a Brit I read this book both out of an interest in America, but also to see whether there was anything that resonated with my British experience, and I certainly feel that we too are on a similar path (in a way perhaps that the Netherlands and Scandinavian nations may not be in quite the same way).

I notice that some people become increasingly belligerent at any mention that technology has any downside or ‘shadow side’. It is almost as if they have invested so much in the striding out that they can’t afford themselves to believe in what they have done having any flaws. Often the masses have digital changes imposed on them without being offered any alternative. I also get a sense talking to some that they have almost been brainwashed, they are on a recording, if they say it often enough as a mantra, it must be true. But then this might also apply to those of us who at least raise a question-mark over the unremitting ‘progress’ enforced on us.

As someone who believes that the technological advances of the past 2-300 years have brought great progress, I still want those who use them to do so with integrity. Technology is a tool, as Berman says, not life itself.

It seems to me that a useful metaphor for this situation is a heart with narrowing arteries, making it increasingly difficult for our life blood to get through.

For a book of less than 200 pages I felt that Berman got quite a bit into it, and fear I may not have done it the justice I intend. However, alert to the fact that this is a pre-9/11 book, I am interested to read its two successors to see whether they led Berman to remould any of his perceptions and ideas.

Although Berman refers to the views of both sides of the political spectrum, offering the evidence on which they base their views, he makes no such attempt to qualify his statement that ‘no one reads’ which I found quite amusing, but would like to see it supported.

Berman also cited many interesting writers to whose work I am now going to be led. ( )